by Various
‘He’s punishing that woman because she is not in the military?’
The officer gave her an indulgent smirk. ‘No, Agentia. He’s encouraging her to be grateful to those who are.’
Aristarch Proge was exactly the man Gallor had expected him to be. Fighting lamely against obesity, he was squeezed into a heavy uniform dripping with medals and honorific icons. He wore a stiff ceremonial kepi atop thinning hair, and he moved everywhere in a purposeful, if affected, stride.
The Death Guard legionaries took up stances in the middle of the room and stood sentinel as Kendel greeted the Proximan ruler. Impassive in their wargear, to Proge and his aides they resembled statues made of ceramite.
Gallor’s gaze fixed on one particular member of the Aristarch’s staff, a hard-faced woman with a single long tail of crimson hair emerging from the right side of her otherwise shaven head. The woman – a marshal of some kind, judging by her rank tabs – was momentarily open-mouthed at the sight of the two legionaries. But Gallor got the sense that her reaction was not just because of what they were, but who they were. Her eyes kept straying to the skull sigil of the XIV Legion on their shoulders.
Proge’s effusive greetings had come to an end, and the governor was giving orders to his people to bring refreshments. Unnoticed, the marshal took a wary step towards the Space Marines. ‘You… were not expected,’ she said, turning to address Kendel. She spoke quietly, so her words did not carry. ‘Are they… I mean, has there been some problem?’ The marshal was fumbling for the right words and failing to find them.
Kendel shook her head, giving a flat smile. ‘Have no concern. Despite what stories you may have heard about the actions of Mortarion’s sons, I vouch for these Death Guard. They are loyal to Terra and the Emperor.’
‘Ah.’ Colour drained from the marshal’s face. ‘Of course. Of course.’ She bowed and made her excuses, slipping away as Proge returned with ornate cups of tisane.
‘Agentia Kendel,’ he began. His voice had a low, slightly nasal register. ‘Please, join me in a drink and let us get down to cases. How may the people of Proxima serve the Imperium?’
Gallor noted that Kendel accepted the tisane but did not sip it. She settled into a chair as Proge sat across from her. His aides retreated to the corners of the room and stood stiffly at attention. ‘I come with grave news,’ Kendel replied. ‘What I am about to say will upset you, sir. There is a dire threat on your world. A threat not only to Proxima Centauri’s safety, but to that of the entire Imperium.’
Proge’s permissive manner faltered at the grim tone of Kendel’s words. ‘That is no small claim.’
‘Indeed.’ Kendel fixed the Aristarch with a hard, unwavering gaze and unfolded the same narrative she had presented to Gallor and the others on board the Velox.
The Death Guard watched the progression of emotions that swarmed over Proge’s florid face. At first shock, at the possibility that the Warmaster’s agents were using a co-opted Imperial astropath for clandestine communications; but that swiftly reformed into slow-burning anger as Kendel made it clear that this misdeed was taking place on Proxima Majoris, right under the noses of Proge and his people. Some of his aides could not remain silent during the witch-seeker’s explanation, and Gallor noted which of them decried her most stridently, sifting their reactions for signs of artifice.
But Kendel did not allow herself to be put off, and she relentlessly followed the accusations to their end, shooting down every denial with cold facts, answering every question with clipped, direct replies. Gallor felt a growing admiration for the woman. She approached things in a manner very similar to Death Guard doctrine – methodical, unflinching, and forceful.
At last, Proge’s manner fell towards dismay as he found there was no other path open to him but acceptance of the Agentia’s revelations. The Aristarch sat back in his ornate chair and seemed to shrink beneath the weight of new truth. ‘By the First, how could this happen?’
‘The ways of the traitor are varied,’ said Kendel, her smoky, rough tones hanging in the tense air. ‘Rest assured that no stone will remain unturned in my investigation.’
‘Of course!’ barked Proge, and he summoned one of his people with a brisk wave. ‘Habeth! You will give the Agentia everything she needs!’
‘Your servant, Aristarch.’ A man in a heavy brown coat with much bronze braiding stepped forwards and introduced himself to Kendel as Planetary Warden. A ranking law enforcement officer, Gallor guessed, but his first impression of Habeth was of someone too prim to dirty himself with the work of urban policing.
Kendel shot the Death Guard a brief look that communicated a similar disquiet. Later, both of them would recall how, in that moment, Agentia and legionary alike should have acted on their first instincts.
But by the time they understood that, too much blood had already been shed.
Four days later, Vasado was the first casualty of the investigation.
In scry-monitor footage from where the River of Exemplars met the Oval Palisade, Kendel watched him die in slow motion. The driver of a hover-lifter heading westwards suddenly appeared to lose control of his vehicle, and the fan-drive truck bounced off the churning waters of the canal in a howl of revving engines. In less than half a second, the hauler mounted the quay and bulled across the pavement, ploughing down three other civilians before flattening Vasado beneath its plenum skirt. Its path ended when it struck a wall and caught fire. By the time emergency responders arrived, the driver had burned to death. He made no attempt to exit the vehicle.
Dutifully, Warden Habeth poured a platoon of uniformed constables into the area to investigate, but every one of his detectives returned a report of happenstance.
‘A tragic accident,’ Habeth had told her, from behind the desk in his air-conditioned office. ‘Majesty has overpopulation issues, and these things happen more often than we would like.’
Any suggestion of conspiracy was met with polite denial. The reports pointed to the innocent civilians who had died in the incident; surely an assassin would not have struck against one of the Agentia’s party in so blatant a way, with so much collateral damage? Habeth gently condescended that Kendel might be better to concentrate on the matter at hand rather than assume a connection where none existed.
Outwardly, she accepted his report with a rueful nod. Inwardly, she pushed Habeth up her list of suspects and ordered Qelvyn to begin surveillance on him.
Kendel ditched the official hydrofoil launch and pilot that the Aristarch had provided, and escaped into the backstreets of Majesty. Blending into the crowds, she reached the others over their encrypted vox-net and tersely gave new orders.
‘Habeth is lying, then,’ Kyda noted.
‘Perhaps.’ Kendel lost herself in the folds of her hood and hailed an automated water-taxi, scrambling inside. ‘We’ll need proof.’
Lady Pau Yei’s words echoed down from orbit. ‘Assuming Vasado was deliberately terminated, we must ask the question – why him?’
‘Soft target,’ offered Gallor.
‘A warning?’ Qelvyn did a fine job keeping her emotions tamped down, Kendel noted. She had been friendly with the other trooper, and doubtless felt his death more keenly than anyone else.
The Agentia shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’ In her hands she cradled a compact personal auspex module that had been a favoured tool during her time hunting rogue psykers. She peered at its illuminated screen, studying an abstract map of Majesty. ‘Vasado went into the city to follow a lead. I believe he found something, and was killed before he could communicate it to us.’
She heard the doubt in Kyda’s voice. ‘How will you be able to determine what he learned?’
‘I have an idea…’ The water-taxi halted and Kendel jumped down from the passenger cabin. She was on the far side of the great waterway from where the ‘accident’ had taken place. Constables were still patrolling there, and n
earby an imposing discipline master shouted at a gaggle of civilians for daring to loiter. ‘I think I know what Vasado came here to observe.’
Kendel had studied the footage of the trooper’s death dozens of times, and in each iteration she had become more certain that he was watching something. The scry-scan image did not show enough of the surroundings to make it clear what that was, but now she stood there, it was obvious.
It was a deliberately nondescript, heavily over-built pinnacle of thick stone. It had few windows, and those that were visible were opaque with stained glassaic. The exterior was covered with fine detail that at a distance looked like random patterns of aging; but close at hand, Kendel knew it would form into strings of symbols. She had seen the like upon the outer walls of the City of Sight and a hatch aboard the Velox – psychogrammetric wards to protect those within from the mental tumult of the world outside.
Like the City of Sight, this tower – the planet’s principal astropathic spire, home to its psyker cadre – was off-limits to anyone like Kendel. To allow a pariah into its environs would cause those within to suffer greatly.
Kendel’s hand slipped into her robes to rest upon the grip of a pistol, and she boldly marched across a connecting bridge, directly towards the spire’s entrance.
By the time Gallor and Kyda arrived at the astropaths’ citadel, the situation had deteriorated to the point that the Space Marines thought a weapon had been detonated in there.
After some consideration, Gallor realised that was not far off what had happened.
Amendera Kendel was as toxic to the astropaths in the spire as a choking gas would be to any ordinary human. As they crossed the building’s tiled atrium, the legionaries saw dozens of the blind psykers buckled at the knees or huddled together in corners. Many of them lay moaning with the extrasensory agony that the null’s presence inflicted, while their seer-automata stood patiently nearby, waiting to guide them away.
Ululating warning sirens were sounding, and shutters made of heavy psi-dampening materials had slammed down over entranceways leading deeper into the building. They found Kendel at the centre of the screaming and the panic, her weapon drawn. She was surrounded by a handful of the hardiest of the psykers, and demi-human security servitors armed with stubber weapons and restraint net casters.
One of the astropaths, an angular meister with a high hat and sallow complexion, shouted at Kendel. Gallor saw he was bleeding from his nostrils and his ears. ‘Get out!’ he screamed. ‘You are burning us within, null! Leave now or we will destroy you!’
‘No,’ Kendel spat back, daring them to approach. ‘There is a rot at the heart of this place. You have a traitor here, and someone knows it. Reveal them to me!’
‘Lies.’ The astropath retorted. ‘Lies, lies, lies!’
During the voyage to Proxima, it had been Kyda who suggested that the corrupted psionic might not, as Kendel had first considered, have been working in secrecy and isolation. She had been uncertain of the legionary’s implication that their target would hide in plain sight, but with Vasado’s death it seemed the former witch-seeker had seen the reason in Kyda’s words after all.
‘No psionic signals could depart this world without leaving some trace. If our target is not among you, then one of you is covering for them.’ She glared at the psykers, menacing them with a step forwards. Kendel didn’t need her gun to kindle their fear.
‘Enough,’ wailed the meister as he reeled away, spitting pink froth from his lips. He snarled a command at the servitors. ‘Kill the woman!’
‘I think not.’ Gallor intervened, he and Kyda making their presence known with heavy footfalls and the slides on their bolters. The gun-drones, intelligent enough to gauge the level of threat posed by two of the Legiones Astartes, showed programmed restraint and held back.
Kendel addressed the meister. ‘Listen to me. I will return to this place day after day, night after night, I will torment you without ever raising a finger…’
Several of the astropaths began to wail like bereft widows.
‘I will do this,’ she promised, raising her hand to present the Mark of the Sigillite branded on her palm to the sensor eyes of the servitors. They bowed automatically and she went on. ‘Neither your guardians nor your Aristarch will be able to prevent it. Unless you tell me what I want to know!’
The meister gave a keening screech and collapsed. ‘There is… no… traitor here!’
But the words had barely left him before the rattle of an explosion echoed through the walls from the spire’s exterior, and Gallor heard the clattering of shattered glassaic.
‘Krak charge,’ hissed Kyda. ‘On the southern face of the building.’
Kendel shoved the meister out of her way and nodded to Gallor. ‘Go!’
He took the order and broke into a sprint, thundering back out into the daylight.
Kendel ran as fast as she could, but the Space Marines left her behind in the blink of an eye as they powered away from her around the side of the spire. By the time she reached them, panting hard, her legs aching, a gun battle was already in progress.
Someone had blown a hole in the side of the building two storeys up, and cast down mono-cables from the ragged rent in the stone. The legionaries exchanged fire with men in worker’s overalls and breather masks, armed with lascarbines. She saw a handful of them hustling another figure – this one in the robes of an astropath – along a jetty towards a torpedo-shaped jet-skiff lying in the swell of the canal.
Crimson threads of energy crackled through the air around her, and Kendel ducked behind a nearby sculpture. Gallor and Kyda didn’t bother with cover; they weathered the beam hits with stoic calm, taking their time over each bolt they fired. Every shot was a kill – with the huge mass-reactive rounds, it could be nothing else. On the unarmoured forms of the masked men, a hit was enough to blast them into unrecognisable meat.
Kyda shifted aim towards the escaping party. ‘I have their range.’
‘No!’ Kendel shouted over the sounds of gunfire. ‘We need the psyker alive!’
‘We can’t reach them before they get to the boat,’ he grated.
‘We’ll find another way,’ said Gallor, before Kendel could respond. ‘But it may earn us the ire of the Aristarch…’ The Death Guard advanced, pulling something from a pack clipped to his waist. A grenade, as big a child’s skull. He hurled it in a low arc, and the device landed with a thud in the middle of the jetty. The hail of lasers faltered as the masked men realised what was happening, but it was too late.
The grenade detonated with a deep roar of concussion and threw up a pillar of river water into the air. Suddenly the jetty was matchwood, and of the shooters there was no sign.
For a moment, Kendel feared that Gallor had disobeyed her and killed them all, but then she heard the shriek of an aqua-jet engine and saw the low skiff rocking in the wake of the blast. A bloody, screaming man slipped off the side of the vessel and under the water, as it vaulted away towards one of the larger waterways.
‘With me!’ Kendel cried, and she scrambled up over a rail, dropping to a quay that had been partly swamped in the explosion. Tethered to the dock was a pilot’s hydrofoil, and she splashed across the waterlogged jetty and onto its weather deck.
Kendel thumbed the starter, and the foil reacted.
She was aware of someone behind her calling out angrily, but then the vessel rocked hard as Kyda and Gallor leapt aboard. She heard Kyda say something indistinct, followed by a heavy splash. Her mind wasn’t on that, her focus now solely on the jet-skiff. Under her hands, the controls bit into the river and the foil powered away. Gallor’s combat blade flashed as he severed the stern line, and Kendel pushed the throttle bar as far as it would go.
Brackish spray came over the bow before the vessel found its pace, soaking her coat, but she ignored it. Kendel aimed the hydrofoil into the wake of the fleeing jet-skiff and leaned forward
s, as if the motion would grant them more velocity.
Red streaks whistled past, wide shots fired more to discourage pursuit than to damage them. Kyda fell to a knee and aimed down the iron sights of his bolter, but did not fire. The constant rising and falling of the skiff and the vibrations of the deck would make any shot a challenging one, even for a legionary.
‘We’ll catch them,’ said Gallor. ‘This vessel’s engine is more potent, if slower off the mark.’
‘As long as we don’t run out of room first,’ Kyda replied, nodding ahead. ‘Look there, brother.’
The canal leading from the astropathic spire opened out into a river, but this waterway was dense with massive cargo ships moving up and down it in long lines, each one like a skyscraper on its side. The jet-skiff snaked back and forth, and Kendel thought she saw panic in the way the helmsman was acting. Too slow to commit to a course that would take it through the wake of the nearest cargo vessel, the fleeing boat was racing straight towards the side of a slow-moving hulk, a wall of red-painted steel rising up to block its path.
‘Fools,’ Kyda offered. ‘They have nowhere to go.’
And for a moment, Kendel would have agreed with the legionary’s assessment. She glimpsed a flash of sunlight off curved plastic as the jet-skiff’s canopy slid shut, sealing the craft’s interior. Then, like a breaching cetacean, it leapt out of the waves and fell, nose down. The craft vanished under the surface and was gone.
‘Throne and blood!’ Kendel spat the curse and wrenched the hydrofoil’s steering yoke hard to port, before their vessel could be pulled into the turbulence left behind. It was a clever ploy – draw them close so that they might get sucked into the side-wake of the big cargo craft.
The hydrofoil lurched in a yawing turn that briefly put the deck at a steep angle, and had the legionaries not been braced, both would have gone overboard. Kendel gunned the engine and swore again as they raced along the side of the ship, losing precious seconds in their chase. The jet-skiff wasn’t a dedicated submersible, that was certain – but in taking a shallow dive beneath the keel of the cargo hauler, it had put them far behind.
